July 2020:
Welcome to my digest of the main events in my practice during July!
The past fortnight has been mentally difficult as I try to navigate a work-work-life balance between coming out of furlough to my part-time stonemasonry role, my artwork, and my whole life. Creatively it has been a bit of a nightmare with plenty of new ideas but a distinct lack of funds, time, and decision-making to enact them. All the same these monthly updates do serve to remind me that great things are still going on.
Hastings Open 2020
I have had ‘Let go’, my drawing from last year, accepted to the Hastings Museum Open Exhibition. This piece has had quite a summer having been published in the Dark Mountain Project spring 2020 issue as well. The exhibition will be opening at Hastings Museum in East Sussex on 27th August and it will be on show until the start of 2021, which is a fantastic period of time it will enjoy in public. There were 1500 applications to this exhibition so to be selected as one of 77 artists is a real honour and I have already spied a lot of beautiful work from other artists who will be exhibiting as well. In this virulent times there will be no opening event, and who knows who will be able to go and see the exhibition in real life, but the saving grace is the long period it will be open for.
Compaction, Romney Marsh
A new oil painting came to fruition today, the result of several weeks of slathering a lot of paint onto canvas.
Based on a real scene in a field on Guldeford Level this heavily impasto work utilises oil paint like mud or clay. I carved this painting into existence rather than painting it.
Over a litre of Titanium White oil paint was dried on newspaper and then applied to the canvas in layers. Later layers were mixed with marble dust to provide texture. Charcoal and plant detritus were used to finish the scene and more marble dust was applied at the end to complete the effect.
The green band of water glowed in real life. The run off from the freshly ploughed field collected in the compacted tyre track and settled on top of the water like oil. The overcast sky made the landscape dreary but it accentuated the green-blue of the water.
This piece meditates upon the farmed landscape as an abused one. Pummelled and worked to death. Needing new fertiliser brought in to ensure new crops will sprout. It works, of course, but the impact of hundreds of acres of churned soil must surely be ruinous for biodiversity and for the climate when a natural carbon sink is stirred and allowed to vent. There is a better way but a century of industrial farming practise is hard to change.
For more images see here.
